The brain is lying to us: a person is not able to remember what happened to him just a couple of seconds ago

Our memories are fake, even if we recall what happened a couple of seconds ago. This means that reality as such does not exist. A new study by an international team of scientists proves: yes, we live in the matrix. But this matrix was not created by aliens, nor by a malicious artificial intelligence that plays with people, keeping them on the Ground, as if in a sandbox. The matrix is generated by our own brain. And we can't get rid of it, because we are our brain.

PRISONERS OF THE CAVE

For centuries, science has urged us to "believe in reason", "perceive the world as it is" and generally trust rational knowledge. Religion, on the contrary, claimed that a person is not able to comprehend the true world with sense organs or devices, and mystical experience is needed to penetrate into the true essence of things.

The best representatives of science, however, warned that everything is not so simple. Plato was the first to draw attention to the fact that we are, as it were, slaves of our own consciousness. He put forward the concept of a "cave": the cave is our mind, projecting only the shadow of the real world onto our consciousness. However, a crudely materialistic approach prevailed. What I see with my eyes (or measure with instruments) is true. Science was built on this in the brilliant XIX century. As a result: an incredible number of inventions, amazing technological progress.

But today science refutes what it has been convincing people for centuries. Everything we perceive, we perceive with the help of the brain. Even if we build a complex machine (artificial intelligence), we still communicate with it with the help of the brain. The brain is lying to us. Point.

DON'T BELIEVE YOUR EYES

In the experiment, the subjects were shown short inscriptions. Some letters were inverted, distorted. Then the volunteers were immediately asked to remember exactly what they had seen. As a rule, people assured that they had seen the correct, without distortion, inscriptions. They "remembered" correctly written words – although in fact they saw something else.

The brain recognized the grains of information, cleared it of distortions and offered the finished result to consciousness. All this was known. But it turned out that the brain simultaneously erases the original picture completely. Forgets what he saw in reality. The brain is only interested in the result, not what it is derived from.

Thus, a new study shows that the brain can substitute for reality. This is a completely new knowledge for us. We thought that by straining, we would still extract a genuine "picture" from consciousness. And she's just not there. After analysis, it is immediately erased.

FIVE MINUTES, IS IT A LOT OR A LITTLE?

So we can't trust the memory. By the way, there has been no trust in long-term memory for a long time.

Read the memoirs of any popular person. It's all so convincing, isn't it? In fact, people construct a kind of fictional model of their past. An experienced reader will understand that he is being fooled, according to some signs, cliches ("I grew up in poverty", "I went to school barefoot", "the idea suddenly dawned on me", "I achieved everything myself", etc.). But the thing is that the "star" when dictates these "memories", begins to believe in them herself. That is why experienced historians distinguish between diaries (described the events of the day in the evening) and memoirs (remembered what happened a long time ago). Historians know that although a person is always lying, the way he rethinks the distant past completely distorts the real picture.

We are not "stars", but we also "remember" not what actually happened, but the version of events that seems more acceptable to us. This is especially true of situations when we were wrong, found ourselves in the middle of a conflict, etc. Perhaps at first we are deceiving, wishful thinking, but we quickly forget how it was. Dialogues and scenes that never happened come to life in our memory. The brain simply constructed them.

The toughest example of "long-term memory games" is the Nelson Mandela effect. When Nelson Mandela died in 2013, many were surprised – is he still alive? And they "remembered" how they "saw" his funeral on TV a long time ago.

WHAT IS GOING ON AROUND US ANYWAY?

Memory is our consciousness. Here is the past, it is no longer there. Here's the future, it's not there yet. If we lived "in reality", we would resemble dancers at a disco, who turned on a strobe light. Flash, flash, flash, blink, blink, blink. But consciousness stitches these flashes into a single canvas. We remember what happened, we expect what will happen, and from this comes what we call the "present" (and that in fact there is a compilation of the past, which is in memory, and expectations of the future, which is in the brain).

And now it turns out that there is no reality as such. The main conclusion from this is that we are not able to see (remember, understand) something that has not been encountered before. And the most striking example is "UFO encounters".

It has been noticed for a long time: people used to see "demons", then "airships", then "spaceships", that is, people meet with something that they explain by the realities of their era. Science initially rejected such topics (especially if it was about "alien abductions"), saying that a person has gone crazy, it happens. But since the 1970s, she stopped at the interpretation of such "memories" as the "collective unconscious". Just what kind of "unconscious" it is, where it exists (not in the "noosphere"), how it descends into our poor heads, was unclear. But now it's clear.

Here a person sees something that he is not able to realize. We now know that the brain instantly erases the entire picture from memory. Clean. Like the "Men in Black" with their flashing lights. It is pointless to look for at least a shadow of reality in the memories of such a person. And he immediately replaces the real picture with another, acceptable, "understandable" for a person. If he is religious, it will be "demons", if he loves fiction, "aliens".

And what is the conclusion from this? Next to us, constantly, there are ACTUALLY events that we are not able to explain in any way. But we are not able to see and remember them.

And then – more. Is it only the "wrong", the extraordinary that instantly erases our memory? Why do some (psychics, mediums) see what we don't see: maybe their brain is simply damaged, and the function of instant erasure is broken? What really surrounds us in reality, and – what is reality?

That's what terrible thoughts are prompted by a simple experience that they didn't think to put for decades. Scientists have destroyed the "present" by placing us in the matrix. But probably for the best: to get out of the matrix, you first need to understand that you are in it.